Rosebud - A Finished Shawl

In May 2014, I started a small Rosebud (Pattern by TinCanKnits) Knit-Along with a couple friends. I found the perfect yarn by Swans Island at our local shop. It's a gorgeous raspberry color with slight variations in the color to add depth. And it's soft - so, so soft.

As it happens, it took me almost a year to finish. I would squeeze in rows here and there where I could. It's been a busy and somewhat crazy year, so progress was slow, but in looking back over a year of pictures I realized that this shawl featured was a nice addition to many family memories.

I knew relatively early on that this was not going to live with me when it was done, but with a dear friend that I "met" through our lovely crafting community on Instagram. I've known Raquel for over a year and from the start, I was so moved by what a sweet and loving person she was, both online, and through our emails back and forth.

In a shocking turn of events (shocking because I NEVER do this sort of thing), my a close friend from home and I traveled to meet another friend from Boston and the three of us had a short but sweet stay with Raquel in Utah. Truly, it was one of the most special memories in my adult life. For starters, I've never flown any where post-children, without children. (That part was mildly traumatic.) Nor have I really ever had a stretch of days devoted exclusively to friends and quilting together. We laughed, we cried, we cried some more, we laughed till we cried, and we had the best memories. I also discovered Utah quilt shops, and I may have broken my bank, but it was worth it.

I chose to give the shawl to Raquel in person - truly the best way to give a special gift. I was so nervous!



I think she loves it. And I love that it was stitched with her in mind... That truly is my favorite way of giving. Making something for someone and knowing all along that that in between all the stitches are little memories incorporated along its journey in to becoming finished.

We took a little drive to have a little photo shoot on our last night in Utah. This was probably my favorite memory of the entire trip. Here's hoping this is a yearly treat. :)

I'm coming to realize that you can't rush the crafting process. Some projects decide to move along quickly and some need to be savored slowly.

Thank you for popping by!

xo,
Jade

Linking up with Amanda Jean for Finish It Friday.

pick up sticks - a DPN needle and crochet hook organizer tutorial

I was talking with my cousin the other day about what we knitters (and crocheter's) need that is not readily available. I puzzled and thought and sketched, and in the end came back to a simple needle/hook organizer.

If you are anything like me, your needles are sitting in a rubbermaid bin, twisted and jumbled together. If I'm looking for a certain size, I usually have to dump everything out, sort them out and start measuring. It's such a headache. And I never know what I have at a glance.

Which brings me to my post today. Some of you have asked for a tutorial on how to make this.
I like that you can dress it up, or keep it simple.

To make a basic Pick Up Sticks organizer, you will need:

Crochet Roll Up		DPN Roll Up
Exterior Main	1 piece of fabric 8.5" x 16.5"	Exterior Main	1 piece of fabric 10.5" x 20.5"
Exterior Back	1 piece of fabric 8.5" x 16.5"	Exterior Back	1 piece of fabric 10.5" x 20.5"
Interior Lining	1 piece of fabric 8.5" x 16.5"	Interior Lining	1 piece of fabric 10.5" x 20.5"
Interior Main Panel	1 piece of fabric 8.5" x 16.5"	Interior Main Panel	1 piece of fabric 10.5" x 20.5"
Ties	2 pieces of fabric 1.5" x 16.5"	Ties	2 pieces of fabric 1.5" x 20.5"
Pocket Panel	2 pieces of fabric 5.5" x 16.5"	Pocket Panel (largest)	2 pieces of fabric 6.5" 20.5"
		Pocket Panel (smallest)	2 pieces of fabric 4.5" 20.5"
Interfacing  (ie. Shapeflex 101)	2 pieces 8.5"x 16.5"	Interfacing (ie. Shapeflex 101)	2 pieces 10.5" x 20.5"z

Equipment needed:

Safety pin

Fabric marker with disappearing ink

Ruler

Iron and board

Sewing machine

Thread

Dull pointy object like a knitting needle

Scissors

NOTE: all seam allowances are 1/4" unless otherwise noted.

If you wish to, you can dress up this pattern and include a pieced or even quilted exterior main panel. I would recommend making it larger than necessary and then cutting it down to size.
Be aware of directional fabrics when cutting fabrics, keeping in mind the overall shape of this project.

These are the parts used in my example for this tutorial (a DPN roll up).

Construction:

Interface both the exterior main panel and the interior main panel (this is the one that will have pockets attached to it).

Stitch the exterior main panel and the exterior back panel together along one long side, right sides together. Press towards the back panel.

Stitch the two pocket panels together along the long side right sides together. Open up and turn right side out and press the seam line. Top stitch with a long stitch (about 3.0 - 3.2mm) 1/8" away from the sewn edge.
Repeat with the second panel if you are making the DPN organizer.

Make the ties by folding each long piece of fabric in half and stitching down the side. Make sure you back stitch on either end.
This probably is the trickiest bit of all, so if you prefer you can use ribbon.
Take a small safety pin and attach it to the seam allowance of one sewn strip. Gently slip the safety pin into the tube. Slowly slide it down into the tube and ease the fabric at the other end as it bunches. You are turning it inside out.

 When you are finished, press each strip and put aside for later.

Assemble the inner part of the roll up by taking the main interior piece (interfaced) and the prepared pocket panel(s). Line it (or them) up along the bottom of the main piece. Stitch along the bottom through the two or three layers 1/8 of an inch away from the bottom to anchor them.

Next, either fold over and mark, or measure the halfway point along the length of the panels. Mark with a fabric pen with water-soluble ink. This will be your first stitch line.

Stitch, with a long stitch length (3.0 mm - 3.2 mm) from the bottom of the panels to the edge of the top panel. Backstitch at the beginning and end.

From this line, take your pen and mark your next sewing lines working from the center line outwards. For a DPN roll-up, I tend to begin with the larger sizes, 1.5" on either side once or twice, then 1.25" then down to an inch. Bear in mind that the larger your DPN needle sizes are, you will need more room to accommodate them. The same applies when needle sets have 5 instead of four parts.

For the crochet roll up, I used a solid 5/8" division for all of the spaces, working from the center out.

Feel free to customize depending on your needs.

I take my iron or a water spray bottle and give the line markings a quick wet down to dissolve the ink. Give it a good press when you are finished.

We are left with two large panels, the interior and exterior. Give everything one last good press. The iron is my best friend. It makes everything so much easier. And more dangerous. :) 

Find the half way point on the backside of the main exterior. This is the point that you want your ties to be located, and will be on the side most viewed when rolled up. Mark this line.

My line will be a little different than yours as I cut this out late at night and my measurements for this particular one are .5" off. Disregard this. :)

Lay the interior panel and the exterior panel, right sides together and line them up. Nest the center seams and pin. Pin all the way around making sure everything is flat and edges match. Leave a gap in the exterior main panel that will not be sewn this round. This will enable us to turn the whole deal inside out.

Stitch along the outside edges. When you reach 1/4" away from a corner, leave your needle in a down position and pivot to continue. Stop and start stitching at either end of the gap. Double check your seams to make sure you have the right seam allowances all the way around. (Ask me how I know to do this.)

Clip all four corners, taking care NOT to clip the stitches.

Very gently turn everything inside out through the gap.

Using a dull pointy object, like a knitting needle or chopstick, push out the four corners on the inside to make sure they come out nice and squarish.

Give everything a good press and carefully press in the seam allowance of the opening. Feel free to pin that spot if you like to keep things lined up.

Using a longer stitch, as before, stitch 1/8" away from the edges all the way around the roll-up taking care not to catch the ties in the way.

Fold the pouch in half lengthwise, taking care not to bunch fabrics, and press. Again. This last step will help keep everything where it needs to be. With a longer stitch, stitch 1/8" away from the fold line stopping and starting at the stitch lines already there. Backstitch at the beginning and end.

Lastly, finish off the ends of your ties. You can sew a tiny zig zag at the bottom of the ties or even some simple straight stitching. I like to tie a knot near the end of each tie. If you think of any more creative ways to embellish your ties, I'd love to see them.

Load up your new Pick-Up Sticks Organizer and enjoy!

If you have any feedback or comments, I'd love to hear them. And if you happen to be on instagram and would like to share, tag your creations with #pickupsticksorganizer. Of course, I'd love it if you tagged me so I could say hi as well. 

Have a great weekend friends!

Until next time,

xo ~ Jade

shimmer - a finished shawl

Last month I joined a mystery knit-along. This was totally new to me, and I thought I'd jump right in.

I LOVED it. There is something so fun about not knowing what the next part of your knitting will look like. Will it be lacy? Will it be striped? Will it be both?

Now that the knit-along is over, I can release the name of the pattern. It is Red Rock Canyon by Romi Designs.

I knit this with two skeins of a lovely Sweet Fiber yarn in the Merino Lite weight. The colors were Sea Glass and Ever Gray. Both colors spoke to me.

As the knitting grew and grew and grew, I became increasingly curious as to how it would look when I was finished and it was off my needles. It is huge (wonderfully so).

I love the different parts to the design and how the stripes ripple.

I'm naming my shawl Shimmer. It is a perfect fit.

 It is quite possibly my favorite knitted item ever.

I can't wait to be able to use this on cool summer nights, after a long day in the hot sun.

Sounds like heaven to me.

a knitterly goal

Our local yarn shop, 88 Stitches, is having a kind of knitting challenge during the next few weeks, in conjunction with the Winter Olympics.

I've decided to join in and challenge myself to knitting a Grace sweater found in Jane Richmond's Island book. It is a beautiful, classic sweater. I'll be casting on tomorrow morning. I've swatched, and measured, and tested out the lace pattern.

This project just begged for a new yarn bowl pouch. (My current yarn bowl/project bag is occupied by my "Color Affection" shawl.)

This pouch is very, very loosely styled by Anna Graham of Noodle-head's open wide pouch. I've used the dimensions for the large pouch, but everything else, construction procedure, zipper application, and so on,  have been adapted to my way of sewing pouches, which seems to be somewhat unique.

Anyways, for this pouch, I used a striped chambray style material for the base, and a couple prints by Tula Pink's Saltwater line that I absolutely adore.

For the yarn, I chose an amazing colored fingering yarn by Sweet Fiber called Super Sweet Sock in the Temperate color way.  It's a gorgeous tealish green, with a kind of aqua shimmer woven in. It's going to be great.

I love it. And I can't wait to cast on tomorrow.

a someday finish, finished

I'm not sure what it is about old unfinished projects, but they seem to grow in magnitude as time goes by. They sit and lurk in the back of our minds, their presence a shadow that can be ignored or forgotten until stumbled across again.

Since autumn, my sewing area has been migrating from it's designated location in our office/sewing space to the formal dining table downstairs. We have am enormous table that is perfect for quilting large quilts, and still having a cutting area on half of it. At first I needed the table to help a friend learn to quilt, then to quilt a large quilt and then to work on a couple large projects that took longer then expected. The dining room was great, but my sewing was taking over the downstairs area. Stacks of fabric began popping up, bins of scraps, and then there was the thread. Somehow, thread falling on a hard floor is worse than thread falling on carpet, and it had reached epidemic proportions. In the meantime, sewing room had grown into a dumping ground for fabric, and notions and scraps, and of course, paper. Somehow, the contents of my cupboards were evacuating themselves onto the floor. Thank goodness for doors, right? Wrong.

I finally snapped. For me, the biggest hindrance to creativity is clutter, and not being able to see your workspace.

Over the course of a day or two, I emptied out my sewing space up stairs, and the closet in our office. (It's enormous and just perfect for stowing everything that doesn't need to be dealt with immediately. It also has a door.)

Everything unnecessary has been purged, and everything useful and needed has been sorted, and organized and put away (mostly - this part is still in progress).

While doing this, I stumbled across a memory. I found these really, really old projects, still unfinished.

Around 11 years ago, my Grandmother, and Mom and siblings attended a local craft fair. I was newly married at the time and was just finding my crafty feet after a few years of non-craftiness. My Grandma and I were intruiged by a type of craft where you either knit or crochet with beads that have been woven onto a strong rayon thread/floss. She started the pale blue crochet project above, and I dove right into making a knitted black clutch, as well as a crocheted black scarf.

Within the next year, my Grandma was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and passed away six months later. Her scarf was unfinished. It still needed to be blocked and fringed and ends woven in. The family gave it to me to complete, and I tucked it away in a pretty box in my sewing cupboard.

Ten years, three kids and 4 homes later, I found it again. I'm pretty sure it's reappeared over that time, only to be guiltily tucked away again, for someday.

I'd had enough. Within minutes the ends were woven in, and it was soaking in a bowl, ready to be blocked. As soon as it was blocked, my scarf was blocked as well. By that evening, I was making fringe. (For some mysterious reason, I thought that this would be WAY harder than it actually was.) Within an hour, my Grandma's scarf was done.

This March, my Grandma will have been gone for 10 years. She's never met my children, but I know she would have loved them. And now I have a little piece of her, a bit of her work, to share with them as a conversational remembering piece. And, I'm pretty sure my daughter would love this scarf. (I've caught her gazing at it adoringly, being a fan of all things sparkly.)

Too often, we let the things that are not present in our day to day life be forgotten. Like old projects, memories too need to be pulled out, and dusted off, and loved.

As for the other two projects in the top picture, I still haven't decided if I'm going to add a fringe to my scarf or leave it be, and I'm looking for a clasp for the clutch. Still, they are well on their way to being finished.

Linking up my finish with finish it up Friday.